Sketchpad
by ipwnyourmother
Summary: Sometimes I still wonder if that sketchpad might be full of drawings of Sam’s face. Sometimes I want to look. Spam Oneshot. Warning: Character death. Told from Carly's POV.


**A/N: I don't own iCarly. I do own several sketchpads, but that's beside the point. All I'm going to say about this is, I'm really not proud of this story. It's not the kind of thing I usually write, and it's not even what I started out writing when I wrote it. I was writing about something else entirely, about characters of my own creation, and then suddenly this piece of angst came out. Oh well. **

**Anyways.**

He never sculpts anymore.

That's what worries me the most. He never, ever sculpts. He got a job at a graphic design company and he tries to use that as his excuse – he's still pursuing his art, he says; he's just using a different medium.

But he never, ever sculpts and he never picks up the sketchpad that was his constant companion before. Sometimes he looks at the sketchpad where it sits on the coffee table and he seems to go to a different place. I know where that place is. I can see it in his eyes. He's going back to the day it happened – the day everything went wrong. And as he goes back, so do I. I watch it all happen again, too.

_Sam was curled up in a chair, her legs pulled up close to her big, pregnant belly. She waved her hand around and grinned as she talked, and the wedding band on her finger glistened as she moved it. Spencer was sitting on the couch, smiling to himself as he sketched her smiling face in that same sketch pad. I sat beside him, watching him shade her lips and add a soft blush to her cheeks. His pencil moved quickly over the sketchpad and he barely looked up at her as he drew – it's as if he knew every curve of her face by heart. I wondered then if he does this often – just sits and draws her. I wondered if his sketchpad was just full of her face, the face of his wife. _

_Freddie strolled up behind us, put a hand on my shoulder and peered at the drawing. "Spence," He said casually, playfully. "You've given her a lazy eye." And then Sam was up from her seat and demanding to see the drawing and Spencer was holding it above his head and shouting that it's not ready. They were all smiles, all excitement – and why shouldn't they have been? Their first child was on the way; their lives were going according to plan. Everything was going right for them. _

I can never let the flashback finish. I can't let it finish, because it hurts me, too. I have to stop it while everything is still perfect, while Sam is laughing and Spencer is defending his sketch. I _can't _let my memory go further than that, because going further hurts.

I wish that stopping my memory could stop his, too. Because I see him go through the whole memory. I see the way his face contorts with sadness and his shoulders slump as he remembers it. I used to try and talk to him about it. I used to think that might help. In the beginning… in the beginning, he ignored me. And then I pushed him too far.

"_Spencer, you can't shut me out like this! I'm your sister! It's not fair!" I knew the moment I said those words, I'd gone too far. There was nothing fair about this situation. I shouldn't have said it. But it was true, wasn't it? Spencer couldn't shut me out. Couldn't push me away. I was hurting, too. Talking had to help. Talking always helped. I was so sure I was doing the right thing. So sure._

_And then Spencer shattered my confidence by turning around, his eyes moist with furious tears. The look on his face – the pain – was enough to make me realize talking to me wouldn't help him. The words that poured out of his mouth were enough to make me realize talking to him wouldn't help me, either. "Is it fair that she's gone, Carly?" He asked, staring at me with unblinking eyes. "Is it fair for my whole world to end and me to have to keep on living in it? The sun rises every morning and the stars appear every night and I have to keep on going when my world has __**stopped**__, Carly. Is that fair?" He stared at me for another moment, his lower lip trembling slightly and then he opened his mouth and took in a deep, shaky breath. "Don't talk to me about what's fair." He said, turning his eyes to the ceiling and shaking his head once. "Just don't." And then he left the apartment, left me there to cry by myself in my old bedroom. _

He's gotten better since the beginning. In the beginning, – right after it happened, I mean – when the wound was fresh, he would just lay on the couch all day, watching the boating channel. He wouldn't even cook for himself. He barely touched his food when I made it for him. I had to move back into the apartment to take care of him.

He eats now, and he cooks, and he only watches the boating channel occasionally.

But he never, ever sculpts. And he never, ever touches his sketchpad, except to wipe off the thin film of dust that occasionally forms on it.

Because the sketchpad hasn't been moved in a year. It hasn't been moved since that day, when Sam was laughing and demanding he let her see it, and then her lips suddenly formed a perfect 'o' of surprise, and she crumpled on the ground with a loud cry. It hasn't been moved since Spencer dropped it there on the coffee table, the picture he'd been working on facedown. It hasn't been moved since Spencer fell to his knees beside Sam as a pool of red formed between her legs. It hasn't been moved since Sam lost her baby and, with it, her life.

Sometimes I still wonder if that sketchpad might be full of drawings of Sam's face. Sometimes I want to look.

But I never, ever will, because I won't be the first one to move that sketchpad. I just won't.

**A/N Update: When I said I wasn't proud of this story, I didn't mean I wasn't proud of my writing. What I meant when I said I wasn't proud of it was that I wasn't proud of the angst I'd written. Anyone who has read my other stories knows that I don't write angst. So thank you to everyone who has reviewed this and messaged me saying that I ought to be more proud of my writing, I appreciate it, but it's not necessary because I _am _proud of everything that I write.**


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